Recipient encourages organ donors

In 2007, doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told Dick Veale that he had a month to live and he had better get his affairs in order.

"I was prepared to go," the San Clemente resident said.

Today, he is a healthy, walking ambassador for Donate Life, a campaign that urges people to volunteer as organ donors when they obtain or renew a driver's license.

It was the pink dot on 28-year-old Brian Pavel's South Dakota driver's license that saved Veale's life after Pavel, at work in Sioux Falls, S.D., accidentally fell from a roof. He died from his injuries, but doctors kept him alive long enough for his organs to be harvested.

"I have his heart and his liver," said Veale, 69.

"Forty-four people other than me have organs, tissues, bones, eyes and everything from Brian Pavel. Forty-five people are so thrilled to be alive and working and doing well today because Brian Pavel signed up to donate life on his driver's license."

On Nov. 3, 2007, Veale got the phone call that he had been awaiting for for eight months since learning that he had amyloids, a disease in his liver that produced a protein that was on the verge of shutting down his heart. He needed a heart and a liver.

The two surgeries took 13 hours. Veale awoke three days later with 16 tubes coming out of his chest. Three months later, he was home in San Clemente ready to play golf and tennis again.

He is so eager to share his story and his message that he has written a book – "Angels in my Path" – about people who helped, about how his family rallied around him, about how he wrote a heartfelt let-ter to the anonymous fam-ily of the anonymous or-gan donor as soon as he was able to after surgery and how he ultimately managed to contact and meet the Pavel family for a profound sharing of sobs and smiles.

"We're very close," Veale said. "We keep in touch."

Every April, Veale serves as an ambassador for Donate Life during the movement's annual awareness month. He also offers his services as a guest speaker, as he did Jan. 31 at a San Clemente city employees' awards luncheon. Veale is a member of San Clemente's Golf Course Committee. His wife, Holly, is a former San Clemente mayor.

"I am blessed, and I am lucky," Veale told his audience. "I got a perfect match. There are a lot of people out there who don't have the opportunity to have a transplant like I did."

Nationwide, he said, more than 116,000 people are on a waiting list for a transplant, 20,000 of them in California. More than 18 die every day while waiting.